Death Along the Natchez Trace

By Josh Foreman and Ryan Starrett

The Natchez Trace is the "Path of Nations," a 450-mile-long game trail stamped into the earth by primeval bison. Once the domain of the Natchez, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Cherokee tribes, the Trace nurtured these groups, but it was also watered with the blood of tribesmen long before any white man trod on it. European settlers eventually used the path to navigate between the backwoods Cumberland settlements and the cosmopolitan city of Natchez, with Spanish gold clinking in the seams of their clothes and wads of tough jerky turning in their cheeks. Today, the Natchez Trace stands as one of the prettiest and most history-soaked pathways in the United States. Join authors Ryan Starrett and Josh Foreman as they look at the myriad ways people have lived and died along it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781439674482

Josh Foreman

Ryan Starrett was birthed and reared in Jackson, Mississippi. After receiving degrees from the University of Dallas, Adams State University and Spring Hill College, as well as spending a ten-year hiatus in Texas, he returned home to continue his teaching career. He lives in Madison with his wife, Jackie, and two children, Joseph Padraic and Penelope Rose. Josh Foreman was born and raised in the Jackson Metro Area. He is a sixth-generation Mississippian and an eleventh-generation southerner. He lived, taught and wrote in South Korea from 2005 to 2014. He holds degrees from Mississippi State University and the University of New Hampshire. He lives in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, with his wife, Melissa, and his two children, Keeland and Genevieve.

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PREFACE

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had.

I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

—James Michener

The Natchez Trace is a trail of animal necessity and human ingenuity. It is a path of peace and prosperity as well as war and destruction. It is a way in the wilderness that connects two cultural capitals. It is the four-hundred-plus-mile stretch of land connecting Nashville and Natchez.

The Trace began as a prehistoric game trail used by wild animals navigating virgin forests. It was later used by pre–European contact Indians who later became the Natchez, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Cherokee tribes. It saw its heyday from circa 1790 to 1820, when Kaintucks decided that it was cheaper to travel up the old Indian trail to Nashville (rather than pay for boat fees back to their northern homes). When the steamship made traveling the Trace impractical, it endured. However, less traffic meant fewer towns between Natchez and Nashville. It also signaled the end of the age of stands (hostels along the Trace). On the eve of World War II, President Roosevelt signed legislation to complete a parkway roughly paralleling the Old Trace. Today, the 444-mile Parkway is still traveled by hikers, bikers, motorists, locals, tourists and history aficionados.

Billions of transients made the Trace a layover on their yearly migrations (from Canada, à la passenger pigeons) or New Orleans (via the Kaintucks). The outcasts of society (like Samuel Mason), the feted of society (like Bernie Ebbers) and society itself (like President Jackson) made the Trace and its environs their abode. Most used the Trace as a means to move from one destination to the next (the buffalo seeking the salt licks of central Tennessee and John Swanton, the mailman charged with delivering the Nashville mail to Natchez and vice versa), but many chose to build their permanent abodes along the ancient trail (see James Robertson, the founder of Nashville, and Daniel Burnett, owner of the stand Grindstone Ford). Countless died wrapped in the arms of the Trace’s abundant foliage, swamps and forests. They died by alligator, snake, mosquito, fire, bullet, starvation, tornado, battle and suicide. But many more used the Trace, abused the Trace, nourished the Trace, rebuilt the Trace and made a life along the Trace.

The Natchez Trace is a mysterious, haunted, beautiful piece of Americana. Its stories, recorded and unrecorded, have nourished generation upon generation of storytellers.

The following book is a collection of a few dozen tales of the Natchez Trace. Aside from the last chapter, we have tried our damnedest to root every chapter, every vignette, in verifiable history. We hope that you enjoy the following tales. More importantly, we hope you explore the Natchez Trace—in person or via your own research. It is an invitation to get to know the Natchez Trace we grew up on, the Natchez Trace we still reside near, the Natchez Trace we love.

Chapter 1

FIRST CONTACT

BOWS, BROADSWORDS AND DEAD ALL AROUND

SPANISH RIVER FLIGHT, 1542

Moonlight fell on the body of Hernando de Soto. The Indians could not be allowed to get the body, or else the conquistador would become disassembled. The Indians would love to string his parts from the branches of some cursed tree. No, De Soto would instead find his grave among the gars and catfish, nineteen fathoms deep.

His men took one last look at their adelantado and then slotted him into a carved-out oak log. They nailed planks over the body and sank it in the middle of the Mississippi River, somewhere off northeast Louisiana. De Soto’s dream of finding gold in the Southeast sank along with him. Soon, the men of his expedition would come to an agreement: after three years traversing this land, they would get the hell out. Luis de Moscoso would lead them.¹

The Spaniards traveled west, hoping to reach Mexico overland. But west offered only hunger, privation and guerrilla attacks. The Mississippi, they decided, was their best chance at escape. But in order to travel the river, the 350 Spaniards, whose linen clothes had long ago disintegrated, would need substantial boats. Among them was a master shipbuilder, but they would need to source their shipbuilding supplies from the land around them.

They set about sawing planks from logs, twisting rope and carving oars. They hammered their arquebuses into nails and collected as many Indian blankets as they could to make sails. By the summer of 1543, the men had built seven brigantines and were ready to begin sailing them south, to the ocean and to Mexico.

The body of Hernando de Soto was slotted into an oak log and sunk in the Mississippi River in the dead of night. Image originally published in Our Country in Story (1917). Internet Archive.

But the months of shipbuilding had aroused curiosity across the river. There, on the east bank of the Mississippi, a young cacique named Quigaltanqui had surmised that the Spanish would try to escape by the river. Quigaltanqui hated the Spanish and wanted revenge for three years of Spanish raids on Indian villages.

While the Spanish built their ships, Quigaltanqui sent emissaries to the other caciques along the river. The Spanish should not be allowed to leave, he argued; if they never made it out of the Southeast, they wouldn’t be able to tell their countrymen what they had seen during their three-year expedition. Maybe they could rid themselves of the Bearded Ones forever. The other caciques agreed, and a plan was made to attack the Spanish as soon as they set out on their voyage.²

The 350 Spaniards paddled out on July 2, 1543, their seven brigantines powered by fourteen oars each. Tied to the brigantines were canoes carrying a few pigs and 26 tired and scarred horses, all that remained of the Spaniards’ once impressive stock of 225 warhorses. For two days, the going was quiet. Then they began to hear singing. Canoes appeared on the river behind them—one hundred canoes. Each canoe was rowed by at least fourteen men. Some carried as many as eighty. The canoes and the men inside were painted wild colors. As the Indians followed the Spaniards, they sang songs and rowed in unison. The fish will eat you, they sang. The dogs will eat you. You are cowards.

Hoping to scare off the fleet, Moscoso ordered twenty-five of his men to board their own canoes and attack the pursuing Indians. The Spaniards had few crossbows and no arquebuses, so the attack would be carried out with sword and shield. On land, the attack might have succeeded, but the Spaniards would soon learn that canoe warfare was the Indians’ specialty.

When the Spaniards pulled up close to the Indian canoes, many of the Indians dove into the water. Some held the gunwales of their own canoes to steady them, while others swam underneath the Spaniards’ boats, grabbing their gunwales and flipping them. The Spaniards wearing armor sank immediately, joining De Soto on the river bottom. The Indians who remained in the canoes attacked furiously with oars and clubs.

The Spaniards on board the brigantines could only watch in horror as their countrymen perished; the river current was too strong to turn the big boats around and offer aid. Only four Spaniards managed to swim back to the brigantines.³

Milepost 243.3. Ryan Starrett.

A great running battle had begun. For the next three days, the Spaniards would not sleep and would not rest; they would only paddle and steer, hoping to leave the territory of Quigaltanqui. And when the battle was over, Quigaltanqui’s people—whom the French would know as the Natchez more than 150 years later—would sing songs of their victory.

REED ARROWS AND SPANISH STEEL

When De Soto’s expedition of seven hundred disembarked in Southwest Florida in 1539, they carried ashore the European technologies that had helped the Spanish utterly subjugate Indians in the Caribbean, Mexico and South America. De Soto himself had accompanied Francisco Pizarro to Peru and had seen the devastating power of horses, guns, armor and steel when pitted against Indian civilizations.

When the De Soto expedition was fresh and traveling overland, the Spanish sent parties of well-armed cavalry and infantry to explore. Cavalrymen carried lances, and infantrymen specialized in fighting with sword and shield, crossbow or, strangest of all to the Indians, arquebuses, the early, muzzle-loaded guns that fired lead balls or stones in great gouts of black smoke.

Drawing of a conquistador from the Richard Erdoes Papers. Beinecke Library at Yale University.

The Spanish steel proved devastatingly effective against southeastern Indians, who wore little to no armor. About a year and half into their expedition, the Spanish fought a major battle at a fortified Indian village called Mabila. At the start of the battle, one of De Soto’s captains, Baltasar de Gallagos, had swung his sword with such power that his Indian adversary was nearly cut in half, from his shoulder down to his bowels.

The Spaniards’ crossbows fired heavy, iron-tipped bolts with great power, could be operated in tight quarters and did not require special skill or knowledge to use effectively. Their arquebus muskets were crude and cannonlike, could weigh as much as fifty pounds and were unreliable and inaccurate—although impressive, with their thunderous discharges. Both crossbows and arquebuses proved far less effective at fighting Indians than swords, lances, horses and war dogs.⁴

Cavalrymen engaging Indians in the open killed them at will with their lances. The Indians did not fight with pikes, the traditional European weapon used to counter cavalry attacks. And the Indians, who could easily outrun Spanish foot soldiers, lost that advantage to horses.⁵

Spanish armor—which included steel helmets and breastplates, shields, chain mail, leather and thick cotton quilt—reduced the effectiveness of Indian arrows, the Indians’ preferred means of inflicting death on their enemies. But the incredible power, speed and accuracy of Indian archers meant that many Spaniards still fell victim. Bows were light, portable and inexpensive, and they could be shot five or six times in the time it took to reload a crossbow. And Indians could fire their arrows with such force that they could pierce two layers of Spanish chain mail.⁶

The captain who had cut the warrior nearly in half with his sword was immediately feathered with six or seven arrows from another warrior— striking his armor, the arrows had no effect. Indian arrows were tipped with flint or deer horn or sometimes simply sharpened and hardened by fire. Bow strings were made from deer sinew, and bows were used as deadly clubs when arrows were expended. At Mabila, a well-aimed arrow entered another Spaniard’s eye with so much velocity that it exited the back of his head. Indians quickly realized that Spanish armor meant they had to shoot at their enemies’ bearded faces. In that battle, eighteen Spaniards perished from arrow wounds to their faces.

In all, eighty-two Spaniards died in the Battle of Mabila. But the number of Indian dead attests to the superiority of Spanish arms and armor in traditional warfare; the number of Indian casualties numbered in the thousands, with as many as three thousand alone dying to Spanish swordsmen.⁷

A fortified Indian village in Florida, originally depicted by an anonymous artist in 1591. Rijksmuseum.

While the Spanish prevailed on the open field, Indians were masters of guerrilla warfare, striking at night with fire and arrows and fleeing before the Spanish could mount a defense. Indians learned quickly not only to fire their arrows at Spaniards’ faces and other unarmored parts but also to shoot at horses before riders; if the horse died, the Spaniard lost his most effective advantage. The countless guerrilla attacks De Soto’s men endured while traveling in the Southeast contributed to the loss of resolve that followed his death.

Indians were vigilant, sleeping beside a strung bow and a dozen arrows. Indian women could wield bows as well as men, as the Spaniards learned at the Battle of Mabila. Centuries of ranged warfare had trained Indians to evade Spanish arquebuses